ICology Blog

In the latest Chuck Chats! interview, I talked with Stephanie Richard, internal communications advisor for the Calgary Zoo. I first met Stephanie in Seattle this year at an ALI Conferences event. And little did she know she was in for a health debate. Not over internal communications, but something the Calgary Zoo was doing to figure out Canada's greatest animal. Read the chat and we make amends.

Here are some of my favorite takeaways from my chat with Stephanie...

On balancing two primary internal comms channels - email and the intranet...

The Daily Wild was a brain child of the need to get information out to staff in a timely manner and ensure the content was related to “What core information they need to do their jobs effectively each day” for a diverse employee base. We wanted it to be front and centre when staff started their day, so we defaulted it to the homepage of Zoogle. Since Zoogle is a Sharepoint platform, we used a custom-built publishing feature that I schedule the posts which can include photos. I have weekly editorial calendar meetings with my social media assistant and marketing advisor and we pull together our content from that. I have broken the Daily Wild into internal and external sections to signify the difference in the content. I measure the Daily Wild using Google Analytics which I have built into Zoogle.

On employee generated content...

We have lots of zoo keepers share video and photos with us on Yammer. And one of the coolest things we received recently was a set of images taken each week showcasing our elk growing and shedding his antlers. The keepers came to Communications one day and said, “Look at what we have done” and we ran with it and created a time-lapse video from these images.

On accomplishing key internal comms goals this year...

In the last few years, our focus has been on educating the public about the fact that we are a conservation organization that also has a zoo. We know that the best way to educate starts from the inside out. Staff have been the centre of a strategy around building their conservation and sustainability knowledge. About a year ago, our President and CEO presented this push for empowerment of knowledge being the key to educating our visitors. Since then, we have been sending out loads of content to build employee confidence in speaking with visitors, friends, family, really anyone about the amazing work we do with reintroducing species into the wild, community conservation and breeding programs.